More On Transference

I think marriage is a beautiful thing. I think relationships can be wonderful; indeed, I know from personal experience how wonderful it is to have someone special in one’s life. Let us make no bones about this.

But there is something dangerous, I have come to find, in this.

People have explained the strong inclination of teenagers towards “relationships” simply as a function of hormones, as discovering the joys of the opposite sex for the first time, or just for sex in general, or however you want to phrase this. And, while this is indeed a valid observation, I feel that there is a greater, deeper necessity that young people try to fill with relationships. But first, a digression on the so-called problem of “teen angst.”

I was never one to dismiss “teen angst” as something simply hormonal, as a natural process that the child will go through and then “grow out of.” It has always bothered me for some time to hear adults speak of it as “merely” that, to dismiss it as something temporal. I feel instead that because the teenager years are precisely the bridge between the child and the adult that they will undoubtedly be a time of discord and psychological hardship. Of course there will be “angst”! The old, familiar illusions of childhood are being shattered, and the child is being exposed to the harsh realities of an “adult” world. It is here, thrust into this universe of confusion and meaning, forced to make sense out of a seemingly senseless world, that the child forcibly, and against its will, becomes — in varying degrees — a philosopher out of necessity. The child is faced with the existential problem of man all over again, with the same potency and immediacy as any of the great French thinkers. Naturally this is going to be a difficult period. How dare the older people dismiss it simply because they have been through it already! I have found, though, that most adults dismiss this because they have given up to partialization of the world, to the artificial simplification of the universe around them in order to make it more manageable. One finds in “adults” a strict adherence to rules and doctrine, and a total world-view which is highly formulaic and almost ritualistic. Most of them have very little ability to think outside the box, especially — as we have all seen — when the child attempts to teach the adult competency in some new technology. It becomes obvious. The older the adults get, the more they seem unable to change or shift, because they have adhered to whatever formulaic life they have devised for themselves for so long. It is not for nothing that most adults seem narrow-minded.

But I don’t know that they can really be blamed: the universe is, on the whole, full of an awe and terror to a grand scale, full of the overwhelmingness of existence. It is little wonder that most people, of any kind or of any age, once they are aware of this, seek to shut it out or to “partialize” their world experience, or to try again to drift into the realm of childhood somehow.

On the other end of the age bracket, instead of adhering to formula like their parents and grandparents, increasingly one sees young people utilizing not the power of partialization, but the power of transference. This is apparent in the context of these aforementioned relationships. It is, in fact, a viable solution: Instead of using the powers of transference on the parents (as the child does from the time when it is very young), transference can now be used on the partner, promoting it to a god- or goddess-like status in the unconscious mind. With this tool, that prevailing problem of an overwhelming universe is avoided, as the partner becomes the new source of the life-energy which sustains the ego. This is exactly why so many couples, upon breaking up, feel the need to completely villainize the other partner in an attempt to counter-act the sentiments of love and worship that were previously attached to him/her.

The problem, as always, is in facing the the universe on its terms and not your own, about reconciling your inner sense of meaning with the attributes of a universe that you don’t understand, about understanding the paradox of your own bodily helplessness along with your god-like power of consciousness.

Little wonder that people ignore these problems via a partner, or through adherence to a formula, or partialization.

But I’m afraid Earnest Becker says it better than I. I recommend picking up a copy of the Denial of Death for a more detailed analysis. This is just what occurred to me since last night.